Private Settings
Art after the Internet

Private Settings

How does the rampant technological progress and our daily contact with media shape the experience of identity and social interaction?

The exhibition attempts to answer this question from the perspective of the generation of artists born in the 1980s and 1990s, who entered the artistic scene amid the dynamic expansion of the Internet and mass digital culture, in a space full of seemingly limitless possibilities and characterised by an excess of images and information.

For the young generation, the web is not a space beyond material reality, but rather an integral element of the everyday, which encourages increasingly bold design of one’s own identity and its management. While the Internet and mass access to new technologies have reshaped the intimacy of one-to-one feedback, they also provoke expressive individualism and „curating” aspirations of our virtual existence. What matters is affect and presence. And yet, the architecture of the web, in which we vehemently like, hate, recommend, blog, and create ratings, does not favour getting to know the Other, but limits us to a compulsive urge of self-documentation and an optimistic affirmation of the „friends of our friends”.

It is also a landscape of ever-blurring borders between production and consumption, the public and private domains, original and copy, the intimate and the transparent. The irresistible need to express oneself, one’s opinions, and the “authenticity” of the message have had an irrevocable impact on our experience of ties and relations with another human being. Everything is changing: the record and distribution of our own selves, the manner of representation and the potential of identification. The unprecedented freedom of communication and expression generate the possibility of daily performance of gender, race, social roles and hierarchies.

The exhibition is an answer to this striking metamorphosis of the social consciousness, highlighting it as an element which has fundamentally revalued the question of freedom, privacy and anonymity of each and everyone of us. Young artists engage actively in these changes and shape a new language and aesthetic categories. They ask questions about the condition of the individual and the essence of visual representation: the way we perceive and express ourselves through images in the era of aggressive self-promotion and economy of attention. In a way, it can be seen a reaction to today’s imperative of creative participation in public life, symbolised by the figure of a prosumer – at once a spectator and an amateur creator of culture. Along these lines, the logic of late capitalism favours not only solid hardware but, more importantly, inventive software with its promise of personal fullfilment and successful conveying of one's own personality and brand.

“Private Settings“ is also an attempt to shed a new light on the language of contemporary visual culture – from idealised stock photographs and homogenous corporate conventions, to the chill of the digital abyss and the aesthetics of amateur Internet practice, which questions the cult of the professional artist and traditional ways in which art functions in the society.

The exhibition is accompanied by an abundant programme of collateral events – from film screenings and meetings with artists, to performances by Korakrit Arunonandchai, Jesse Darling and DIS and the Internet projects by Czosnek Studio group and the artist Yuri Pattison.
 

Sarah Abu Abdallah and Joey L. DeFrancesco, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Ed Atkins, Trisha Baga and Jessie Stead, Darja Bajagic, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Jennifer Chan, CUSS Group, Czosnek Studio, Jesse Darling, DIS, Harm van den Dorpel, Loretta Fahrenholz, Daniel Keller, Ada Karczmarczyk, Jason Loebs, Piotr Łakomy, Metahaven, Takeshi Murata, Yuri Pattison, Hannah Perry, Jon Rafman, Bunny Rogers, Pamela Rosenkranz, Gregor Różański, Ryan Trecartin, Ned Vena
 

Exhibition production
Natalia Sielewicz

Assistant of production
Joanna Adamiak

Exhibition design
Projekt Praga

Visual identification
Emilia Obrzut

Installation and technicians
Michał Ziętek
Piotr Fryszak
Szymon Ignatowicz
Paweł Sobczyk
Marcin Szubiak
Jakub Antosz
Marek Franczak
Zbigniew Kolasa
Paweł Nowożycki
Michał Dominik
Jan Spytkowski
Rafał Król

See also:

Archive Events connected with the exhibition:

DzieńGodzinaNazwa wydarzeniaMiejsce wydarzenia
20:00 Performance 2012-2555,2556 Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names and The Future
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
14:00 Guided tour Curatorial Guided Tour in EnglishIn cycle „Private Settings” Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
18:00 Meeting Bodies in Space: Identity, Sexuality, and the Abstraction of the Digital and Physical Lecture by Karen Archey
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
16:00 Guided tour Saturday Guided TourThrough „Private Settings. Art After the Internet” Exhibition Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
18:00 Performance Jesse Darling: Habeas Corpus ad Subjiciendum Silent powerpoint performance with text and screengrabs, or some kinda public confessional
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
16:00 Guided tour Saturday Guided TourThrough „Private Settings. Art After the Internet” Exhibition
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
16:00 Guided tour Saturday Guided TourThrough „Private Settings. Art After the Internet” Exhibition
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
16:00 Guided tour Saturday Guided TourThrough „Private Settings. Art After the Internet” Exhibition
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
18:00 Film screening Total Body ConditioningFilm screening
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
18:00 Lecture Teh InterwebsA meeting with Wojciech Orliński
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
17:00 Guided tour Curatorial guided tourThrough „Private Settings. Art After the Internet” Exhibition
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
18:00 Performance DIS: #ThinkspirationNight Run with Noam Chomsky
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
18:00 Lecture Contra-InternetA lecture by Zach Blas
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
18:00 Lecture Habitual new media, or how things remainA lecture by Wendy Chun
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
16:00 Guided tour Saturday Guided TourThrough „Private Settings. Art After the Internet” Exhibition
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
16:00 Guided tour Saturday Guided TourThrough „Private Settings. Art After the Internet” Exhibition
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
16:00 Guided tour Curatorial guided tourThrough „Private Settings. Art After the Internet” Exhibition
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw
16:00 Finissage Finissage of „Private Settings” exhibitionWith PC Music and Hackerspace Warsaw
In cycle „Private Settings”
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilia Pavilion
ul. Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw